Meet two West Hartford women who are turning family history into a lifelong passion.

By Melissa Cole

“Some people like to do crossword puzzles every morning. Some people like to cook,” joked friends and fellow genealogists Diane Gravlee and Jan Augusta, who proudly describe their favorite hobby as “looking up dead people!”

What they really mean, of course, is genealogy. The interesting process of tracing family history back as far as you can go, and uncovering the stories of generations past.

For Brookdale Chatfield resident Diane, the hobby began when she was just 25 years old, long before the internet made family research as convenient as it is today. While living in Milford, Pennsylvania, her mother had often shared stories about the descendants of the Field family. Turns out, her great-great-grandfather was a pretty important guy in the mid-1800s.

“My mother talked about the Field family all of the time. It was just ingrained in me about this family, and I thought, well, I’d be interested in looking into more than what she had,” Diane recalled.

Her research eventually led her to learn more about Cyrus West Field (Nov. 30, 1819-July 12, 1892), an American businessman who co-founded the Atlantic Telegraph Company and helped oversee the laying of the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable in 1858. This invention forever changed communication, allowing messages to travel between North America and Europe in minutes instead of weeks. Diane even owns a commemorative piece of the transatlantic cable!

Field’s life has inspired several books, including the most recent publication: Lightning Beneath the Sea: The Race to Wire the World and the Dawn of the Information Age, published this year by Vermont author James M. Tabor. Tabor also has a local connection as he grew up in West Hartford.

Diane had so much fun uncovering and collecting pieces of her family history, starting with the Field side of the family through her mother, that she decided to see what she could discover about her father’s side. Before long, one family tree led to another. She continued with her late husband’s side and eventually the spouses of her two children.

“So after I realized this is so much fun, I decided to do my dad’s side, and then I thought, well, I was married to George by then, and I thought, I’ll do his mom’s side and his dad’s side. And that was all fine for a while. Then our kids got married, so I did their spouse’s two sides,” she said with a laugh.

Today, Diane’s research fills an impressive collection of binders packed with old photographs, newspaper clippings, birth and death certificates, cemetery records, family histories, and countless other documents she has uncovered over the years. Some of the binders, proudly displayed in the apartment, are hundreds if not thousands of pages thick! 

And that’s not all. For 22 years, Diane and her late husband, George, traveled the entire country in an RV, volunteering with Habitat for Humanity and helping build homes in each and every state.

“For six years, we had no house,” Diane recalled. “But then we bought a trailer base in South Carolina because it was a little cheaper to have a house there back then.”

Genealogy didn’t take a back seat during this time though. Diane often scouted out old cemeteries while on their travels. 

“When we were traveling in the motor home, we would go to courthouses and the county clerk’s office and get the actual copies of the documents,” Diane said. “We were stopped for the night somewhere and George would say, ‘Okay, what cemetery are we going to in the morning?’ He loved it as much as I did.”

Jan and Diane met more recently thanks to their shared passion for genealogy, and today they often swap stories about their latest discoveries and the people they’re researching.

Jan also volunteers with Find a Grave, a free online resource where users can search for and create memorial pages for people who have died. She is often asked to help locate graves at Fairview Cemetery.

“You can get lost there,” Jan joked. “It’s a little bit of a scavenger hunt because only some of them are in straight rows.”

She’s also helping a family in Slovakia learn more about what happened to their family after some of the relatives immigrated to America.

“With the internet, there are people in Slovakia who are looking for long-lost grandparents, great-grandparents who came to America, and they can’t find whatever happened to great-grandpa,” Jan explained. “So they give me their name or the information they have, and then I dig up the rest like who they married. Because when they came here, they lost track.”

When Jan and her husband recently traveled to visit their daughter, who lives outside of Pittsburgh, Jan realized they were just a short trip away from information that could help her piece things together for the family in Slovakia.

“I said, ‘We’re not far from going across the river to Ohio and getting the death certificate of the great-grandfather!’” Jan recalled.

So she did just that. Jan tracked down the death certificate, and the family was incredibly touched and amazed by the discovery. Her research also uncovered a long-lost cousin.

“And then I found the connection, I guess it would be his second cousin, who lives in New Haven and is active in the church there,” Jan said.

Turns out, the world is pretty small after all. And thanks to people like Diane and Jan, family histories that could have been forgotten are preserved. These friends know genealogy isn’t a hobby for everyone, but they hope their passion inspires younger generations to become more curious about where they came from.

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